Bank Mystery Shopping

Kinēsis employs a purchase intent based approach to mystery shop program design. This approach helps our clients identify and reinforce sales and service behaviors which drive purchase intent and loyalty. This approach helps clients focus training, coaching, incentives, and other motivational tools directly on the elements of the customer experience that will produce the largest return on investment.

Bank Channel Experience Shopping

Kinēsis’ bank mystery shopping programs are employed by banks to fulfill a variety of research purposes. Some of these research purposes include:

The branch continues to be the cornerstone of establishing the customer relationship. In-branch bank mystery shopping evaluates and motivates sales and service behaviors of platform and teller staff.

Shopping competitors allows our clients to benchmark their sales and service behaviors relative to their competitors.

Internal shops evaluate service provided to internal customers to identify and overcome “bottlenecks” in internal service delivery which may hinder the ability to provide optimal customer service.

LifeCycle bank mystery shops are designed to evaluate the customer experience across a variety of delivery channels, with a spectrum of bank transactions, over an extended period of time.

Web mystery shopping allows managers of web channels to test ease of use, navigation and the overall customer experience of the website.

Increasingly, customer relationships with their bank are being deepened through mobile channels. Bank mystery shopping allows managers of mobile channels to test ease of use, navigation and the overall mobile experience.

Other Bank Mystery Shopping Programs

Kinēsis’ investment sales mystery shopping program provides clients with detailed information about the investment sales practices, specifically with respect to disclosure and suitability.

Kinēsis helps financial institutions self test to evaluate fair-lending compliance through the use of mystery shoppers or post-transaction surveys to test for disparate treatment, overt discrimination and other prohibited lending activities.

Our truth in savings mystery shop program is designed to evaluate the presence, timing and accuracy of annual percentage yield (APY) quotes.

Kinēsis’ truth in lending mystery shop program evaluates the presence, timing and accuracy of oral and written annual percentage rate (APR) quotes.

This management philosophy is as true today as it was 50 years ago when W. Edwards Deming used it. The business case for bank mystery shopping is two-fold: measurement and motivation. If conducted properly, bank mystery shopping not only is a customer experience measurement tool, but it is an excellent motivational tool to motivate appropriate sales and service behaviors across all bank delivery channels.

Unlike customer feedback tools designed to inform managers about how customers feel about the bank, mystery shopping focuses on the behavioral side of the equation, answering the question: are our employees exhibiting appropriate sales and service behaviors?

Regardless of how much you spend on external messaging, it is your employees who animate your brand, and it is imperative that their sales and service behaviors be aligned with the brand promise. When a customer perceives a disconnect between an employee representing the brand and external messaging, they almost certainly will experience brand ambiguity, undermining investments in external messaging. Mystery shopping is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand.

Bank Channels to Shop

Mystery shopping, like all customer experience investments, competes for budgetary resources. We believe, sales channels and sales behaviors offer the most ROI relative to other types of shopping. In terms of prioritizing mystery shopping resources, shops of sales channels and sale behaviors should be the first priority followed by more transactional shops. With the increasing use of universal associates and transforming tellers into sellers, it is incumbent on managers to measure and motivate these higher level sales skills, in both branches and contact centers. After sales behaviors have been prioritized, if resources remain for mystery shopping, transaction scenarios should be included in the program.

For more information about a process to align behaviors to the brand, click below:

Bank Mystery Shop Design Considerations

The best practice for mystery shop design is to focus on empirically measureable behaviors using objective questions. We’ve found the best methodology for determining which questions to ask is to start with your brand promise, and determine which sales and service behaviors animate the brand. From this list of expected behaviors, the next step is to map each behavior to a specific question. Avoid compound questions which ask about two different behaviors, unless you expect both behaviors to be present at the same time, and you are not worried about distinguishing if one is present without the other.

Open-ended questions, either in narrative form or qualitatively asking what shoppers liked or disliked about the experience, add valuable context for understanding the customer experience. Many of our bank clients consider these qualitative observations the heart of the shop.

While the core of the bank mystery shop is objective measurements of specific behaviors, there is a place for subjective impressions, such as rating scales used to collect shopper evaluations of various dimensions of the customer experience, as well as the overall experience itself. These subjective ratings provide context for interpreting the customer experience, and specifically the efficacy of the objective behaviors measured. For example, purchase intent ratings calculate a correlation between the objective behaviors measured and purchase intent, identifying which behaviors may be more important in terms of driving purchase intent, and which investments in training, incentives and rewards have the most potential for ROI.

Alignment to Customer Expectations

With the understanding that mystery shopping measures employee behaviors against bank service standards, it is a best practice to produce a feedback loop between customer experience survey programs and mystery shopping with the objective of continuous calibration and alignment of service standards with customer expectations. This feedback loop between customer surveys and mystery shopping will ensure the behaviors measured are aligned with customer expectations.

For more information about best practices to avoid common mystery shopping pitfalls, click below:

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